Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults
theatlantic.comI sometimes use business talk as a tool to make countering my points unattractive when having public discussions inside the company.
For example - let's say your boss decides to introduce some mandatory meeting that everyone agrees is useless. Rather then complaining about it in normal language, I would say things like "well, one of our core values is delighting clients, which I would be able to do much more efficiently if we would iterate on our process and try to optimize the time currently used by this meeting".
The example is intentionally simplified and the response is exaggerated, but you get the point - they are the ones encouraging you to use those phrases, which makes it more difficult for them to push back when you do it against them.
The only real risk is a coworker bursting into laughter in the middle of such an exchange.
You have to be careful with that ... I would sometimes do the same thing to managers who don't have a clue what our business actually does. They're nodding along to something that's totally meaningless and when I wrap up the nonsense you can tell that they want to kick off their shoes and sing Kumbaya. If you're going to do this, you have to be sure that none of your coworkers will burst into laughter and that none of them will tell the clueless manager you were making fun of them.
> ... sometimes use business talk as a tool to ...
I think it's natural to want to speak in a language or style which one might think others approve. However, I have found that while many managers are apt to use biz-speak/buzzwords themselves, it's not necessarily what they want to hear from others.
If you can instead speak in clear, concise, and empathetic sentences that get to the point, most people really appreciate and crave that-- especially when things are critical. Unfortunately that's very hard to do. There's a fine line between getting to the point and coming off as a cold-fish personality. It takes lots of practice.
You're right, but these are two different scenarios: 1) you really want to communicate something to someone so that they understand it well, 2) your PHB has already decided what is best for you and you choose your defence strategy; in that case using buzzwords might be helpful.
Everyone knows, privately in their inner thoughts, that "biz-speak" is baloney.
They use that language as a front for insecurity, not knowing what to say, or not being willing to say what they really mean. If the PHB is obfuscating an unpalatable (and non-negotiable) demand in biz-speak, it's not like parroting back some biz-speak is going to change his mind or strong-arm him.
You chances are better if you address the actual issues in plain and sensible language (or perhaps don't say anything at all). Even if it doesn't work, it at least lays bare the insincerity of the PHB's biz-speak.
Oh that is actually quite masterful trolling. I shall adopt it.
Can you give an example of a time that's really worked? I enjoy giggling along at that sort of thing but I assume most managers see right through it.
> difficult for them to push back
Describing pushing back on push-back with "push back".
Oh "values". This meaningless buzzword has creeped into every facet of modern life. From politicians and their "western values" to CEOs and their "values" to baseball teams and their "values", everyone uses "values" to justify their evil or to defend or excuse their evil. And of course there is the "alignment" of "values".
Oh, stealing signs doesn't align with your team's values. We benefited from it greatly for years, but it doesn't align with our values since we got caught.
It's like an amoral organization's PR version of "my mamma taught me better than that". Some juvenile delinquent gets caught stealing from the store and he says, "I don't know why I did that. That's not me, that's not who I am, I'm not a thief. My momma taught me better than that." If he incorporated himself, he could've said, his actions did not align with his values. Problem solved.
I disagree, I think “values” is a great word that has a clear meaning. It‘s a statement of what things you consider more important than others.
The problem you’re outlining here is that people often use the word while lying.
This is due to the word meaning having multiple meanings.. Example:
"The values we all shares are fundamental"
We all know the meaning of the word values used in this sentence. we don't know it means what in this context, though. Am i talking about freedom? Equality? Somehing else?
I guess you're more of a fields person.
Sounds like a Graeberian Bullshit Job then
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/25/bullshit-jobs-...
This is just effective communication though?
I don't understand why your post is phrased so negatively. Some buzzwords have a sort of standardised meaning across a company so everyone knows what you're talking about.
"We agreed that delighting clients is important and I argue that I can better optimize it by not attending" There is nothing wrong with this?
Sure I'd agree customer satisfaction is a much better word for it.
I disagree, what I would want to say in such a situation is simply "this meeting is useless, let me get back to work", but I would be percieved as a grumpy developer with an attitude.
I wouldn't call all the sugarcoating effective communication as I expect everyone in the company to understand that not wasting people's time will let them do more work and benefit the customer in the end.
>> I disagree, what I would want to say in such a situation is simply "this meeting is useless, let me get back to work", but I would be percieved as a grumpy developer with an attitude.
Of course you would be. Why does it have to phrased in some extremely positive or negative way? Why not something like "I'm pretty busy working on x. If anything comes up in the meeting that needs my attention let me know afterwards and I'll arrange a time to chat."
Because the person conducting the meeting has already failed miserably at their job and must be made aware.
A boss that conducts a useless meeting, knowing it's to hear themselves talk while knowing their subordinates are busy with important tasks that actually keep the company afloat is generally considered, and this is the technical term, a dick maneuver. His/her choice to have a time wasting meeting greatly increases the chances of those employees having to work overtime to accomplish a task on schedule, cutting into their family/personal time. Since most of these types of jobs are salary, there's no overtime pay. So yes, negativity is important in this matter. Why cuddle someone who wants to waste other people's time just to hear themselves speak and have some artificial self-important time?
The personal hosting the meeting thinks it's not useless, so flatly disagreeing without a rationale is useless.
The onus is on the organizer to explain why the meeting will be useful. If they don’t do that upfront, a good culture encourages and supports ICs who ask the organizer for an agenda.
"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
...
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."
https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...
I had a "pleasure" to work briefly for Lionbridge when they acquired the company I worked for. We used to get these company wide emails about various things. You read it,sit and then think how can someone rape the language to a such degree. It was written in English but felt like alien language. The amount of bullshit one manages to squeeze in a sentence is quite astonishing. In my opinion, the main reason behind all these buzzwords is insecurity. People think that if they'd speak plain English (insert any language here), they'd be inferior.
Or that their true intentions / feelings would be exposed. I mean, "management wanted to curtail redundancies in the human resources area, and so, many workers are no longer viable members of the workforce" sounds much nicer than "yeah we fired a bunch of people".
Exactly, it's verbal defense-in-depth. When language has multiple layers of vagueness, you have to actively approach the real meaning through interpretation. Only the staunchly disagreeable are inclined to have a negative reaction through multiple iterations of reading between the lines, and if they speak up they get singled out as not-team-players or even cranks and kooks. The rest filter it through an attitude of generosity, desire for positivity, and benefit of doubt, so when they get the message its emotional weight is dampened, and they are in a suitable frame of mind to accept it with resignation.
In short it's pure manipulation of your own tendencies for social cooperation. Perhaps a bit colorful to say on HN but--it's fucking disgusting. And multiple fields of high-paying professions consist entirely of doing this effectively, up to the scale of entire nations.
I love Matt Levine's take on this:
> From my time in investment banking I can easily believe that most investment banking transactions occur because investment bankers are pretending to do what investment bankers do, acting out scenes from “Liar’s Poker” until they start to seem real. I don’t know why investment banking would be different from any other industry. So sure, yeah, work is a kind of pretense.
What did bankers do before Liars Poker? If Liars poker didn't reflect reality, why did he write it?
Liars Poker reflected a sudden and gross change in the industry due to hyper-success. They went from boring mortgage firms to the richest organizations in human history within a decade, and it distorted thinking and emotional responses, as lottery winnings are wont to.
A startup I worked for was constantly seeking to have everyone aligned on things. The original concept of having people pointed in the same direction was admirable, but it quickly became something like a capital-A ‘Aligned’ (meaning good) with the inverse capital-U ‘Unaligned’ being about the worst thing you could be. God help the person who found the word ‘Unaligned’ on their semester review...
Sounds like the difference between "agile development" and "Agile development" ;-)
It sounds like a cult !
That sounds unaligned. Please report to the Alignment Center at your earliest convenience. Escorts will be available for your use in 20 seconds.
This may not sound the way you intended.
I’ve tried to read that for a solid few minutes and still can’t see what else could have been intended.
"Escorts" is a term for high-end sex workers.
"Escorts" is a term for someone who guides you somewhere.
Alignment: Chaotic Good!
Those places are fun to work in, especially if you have already found another job and you are counting the days before you walk out the door.
As we are at the word play, TIL "turgid", "shibboleth", "cloying", "hackneyed", "wheelhouse", "iconoclast".
To native English speakers I advice to try at least once in their career an employer with English as a business language but not headquartered in any Anglosphere country, where English is a second language to the most employees - the communication dynamics in such environments is quite different and the American corporate newspeak doesn't stick.
+1 to this. We have a lot of offshore support teams, and I've lost close to 20 minutes explaining "nitty-gritty"
Blizzard developer interviews often involve phrases from the Dictionary of Management Jargon [1].
Consider this excerpt from an interview [2] with Steven Chang and David Kosak done on February 6, 2020 regarding the Galakrond's Awakening expansion for Hearthstone after the players complained about the game being unbalanced:
>In terms of the minor balance changes we’ve been doing recently, it’s something where we want to try and see where we can strike that balance where the community feels happy about it without introducing too much change so that the game feels completely different. This is a fine line to walk, and we will always be watching and listening to the community about the amount and timings of changes.
No actual detail is given on anything, it's all empty feelgood sentences. Entire paragraphs go on like this, stating opinions and desires as outlined in the DoMJ:
>Statements of desires – A statement that something is hoped for does not imply any action is to be taken to ensure the desired outcome. Example: I want us all to be happy with our compensation.
1. http://dictionaryofmanagementjargon.yolasite.com/
2. https://www.hearthstonetopdecks.com/interview-with-hearthsto...
This kind of language usage isn't limited to fitting in socially in the business world.
People use overly-elaborate language to appear intelligent or innovative, too. I once spent some time learning a martial art whose founder had replaced all of the standard names for movement and techniques with novel, quasi-technical-sounding ones.
"Multiple attackers" became "plural assailants", "breathing technique" became "respiratory enhancement". "Sparring" became "fisticuffs". Etc.
It was maddening, because he would correct students who slipped up and failed to use his terminology.
https://www.usadojo.com/ross-performance-enhancement-system/
It may not be quite the same thing, but this reminds me of Venkatesh Rao's "Posture talk" from his Gervais Principle series:
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/11/the-gervais-principle-...
I was going to comment on this article, but realized it is futile to go into detail and critizise it at this place.
Simply put I would stay far away from articles and people thinking the way Venkatesh Rao exhibits here. Highly toxic and inhumane management bullshit.
I've come to the same conclusion after reading the article a few times. It pops up on HN a lot.
It's a hilarious and dark read, and certainly has grains of truth, but framing your worldview around that is silly and dangerous.
Rao is a good writer, but he's filtering a parody comic through a parody show, with additions from Dilbert (another parody), and supplements the arguments with examples from management gurus of questionable relevance. It's like Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra, where it's a simulation (parody) filtered through another simulation filtered through another simulation until you have something that doesn't reflect reality.
This reminded me of the section about "Clutter" in the book "On writing well":
> Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes. When the Digital Equipment Corporation eliminated 3,000 jobs its statement didn’t mention layoffs; those were “involuntary methodologies.” When an Air Force missile crashed, it “impacted with the ground prematurely.”
> When an Air Force missile crashed, it “impacted with the ground prematurely.”
When I was a youngster in the Army Cadets in Australia I was told by one of the regular Army seargeants that no one in his company was ever “lost”. They could be “temporarily spatially displaced” but getting lost was strictly forbidden.
I like how in Kerbal Space Program, you don't crash, you "lithobrake". Like airbraking only on something with a bit more resistance.
I had a science teacher who would kill mice before feeding them to his snake. His method was "rapid deceleration" (he threw them at the ground).
Our science teacher in the 7th grade made a model coliseum out of foam-core and would release crickets into it for her lizards to eat during homeroom
That's fantastic haha.
More Air Force jargon, every now and then something on the plane had to be malletized.
Is it really word play: Car Insurance is sold via a talking "cartoonesque lizard", medications that may help your dry skin (or possibly kill you--depending on your particular physiology) are also sold at times via similar talking animated creatures--or implied peer pressure... I could go on and on. So I often ask: how mature or advanced are we really? I personally, am not Impressed.
All areas of practice have their own jargon, words that superficially sound similar to regular English but actually have specific insider meaning that promotes faster in-group communication (and a degree of in-group signalling) - this is true for scientists, software engineers, yoga instructors and yes, business people.
> that promotes faster in-group communication
I think the reason that business jargon gets more flak than usual jargon is because it does not really facilitate faster communication. At least not to everyone involved. Maybe salesman to salesman, business dev to business dev, it would make sense. But then they use that jargon with everyone else (i.e., when it is not appropriate to) and it sounds just as ridiculous as when they hear a dev say "We can't do that without considerable infrastructure overhaul. The current LTS is still a year away from EOL but the vendor has decided to use incompatible dependencies anyway".
If that were me, I'd just say "There's a lot of work involved to make that happen. We're talking 60-hour work weeks if you want that deadline." Or something like that. And if you hear me use the former wording in a meeting with non-technical people involved, you can bet it's just me trying to sound relevant to the meeting (because the next question would be "Could you elaborate?" and I will use more jargon, which will cause a cycle of explanation and boy won't I look important?)
It's ridiculous for me to hear "We need to get this done because we want to capture this market and turn this vertical into a core competency. This will make our portfolio more attractive to investors." when you can just say "Our client really needs/wants these features. We risk losing them if we don't deliver by the deadline."
There's also something to be said about weird turns of phrase that make communications sound less personal. Whereas I would just say "As I already told you," business-speak will make me use "As per my last email...". I don't know about others but the first time I encountered "As per my last email", it did feel foreign to me, like it's not English anymore. Modesty aside, I've read a lot, fiction and nonfiction, but only in my work inbox will I find "As per my last email".
At least part of it is to keep civil.
There are memes floating around that joke that common businesspeak phrases like this are just polite ways to phrase insults, and that's only a little bit of an exaggeration. In my experience, when someone says "as per my last email", it is a very thinly-veiled version of "are you too stupid to understand what I just told you?".
But you have to keep civil in a business environment because a) money is on the line and b) you're going to have to keep interacting with the same people for a long time.
> As per my last email
Isn't this just the "As I've written in my last letter" for the e-mail era? Maybe it's just a cultural difference. (In my native language - and probably because of that in English too - I try use the verbs corresponding to the medium, so if I wrote to someone then I'll refer to that communication as "as you probably read" instead of "heard", and so on.)
> Isn't this just the "As I've written in my last letter" for the e-mail era?
It might as well be. It just always struck me as wrong usage, for lack of better term. "Per", to me, is always in the sense of "for each": per month, per head, etc.
That said, I decided to look it up. And quoting from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/as%20per:
> Is It Grammatically Correct to Say _as per_?
> ...The more ponderous as per is often found in business and legal prose, or in writing that attempts to adopt a formal tone. It is not incorrect to use, but some find it overly legalistic and counsel avoiding it for that reason. On the other hand, it has been used to good effect in facetious mock-business-English ("as per the President’s shiny new Environmental Policy Act"). ...
Looks like I'm not the only one who was puzzled by this turn of phrase. You learn new things everyday. :)
(edit: formatting)
I thought it comes from some tortured Latin (see "per se", and per also meaning "by means of"). And the "as" shouldn't even be there.
>As per my last email
As a native English speaker, if I encounter this phrase I take it to suggest I am not paying attention.
If you work for a business, are you not all 'business people'?
In my working lifetime, having people occupying managerial roles that have zero relevant shop floor experience, has gone (or at least feels to have gone) from being the exception, to the absolute norm. Therefore in my experience, this, combined with the point you started with, is the nub of the matter.
Managers when faced with not having a clue what a team in a field that naturally has its own jargon are talking about, are desperate to recover the balance of power. Thus they end up speaking a language designed to to exclude all apart from those who submit to their influence and join in.
> All areas of practice have their own jargon, words that superficially sound similar to regular English but actually have specific insider meaning
Related: coverage of the recent cum-ex scandals has often included the factoid that "cum-ex" is from the Latin for "with-without".
Of course this isn't true. While cum is Latin for "with", the Latin for "without" is sine -- ex is Latin for "from". Instead, as used in the name of the scandal and the operations behind it, ex is ordinary English financial jargon for "without".
Ex as a prefix does ultimately derive from Latin here but meaning "outside" (hence eg excommunicated or exclave), not "without". This makes sense linguistically because the entitlement to the dividend is outside the scope of what's being bought and sold in the trade.
The meaning of ex in ex-dividend is not "outside".
As originally used in the financial jargon ex-dividend date, ex is used correctly and has the sense "after (in time)". That is, if you buy something ex-dividend, the dividend has already been paid (you're buying after the payment), and so you won't get it. [1] It's sense II in Lewis and Short ( http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%... ) (Note sense II.A.2, which gives us the more vernacular English prefix ex-, as in ex-wife.)
"Outside" is not even one of the many senses of ex in Latin; ex always has a sense related to the core concept of "from". "Outside" is extra.
[1] For some reason, the ex-dividend date is one day before the actual payment, but the idea is still that you're buying after the date of the dividend.
Just a minor correction. The ex-date is not necessarily the date it is paid. It is the day after holders of the security are entitled to the dividend. The actual pay date comes later. The important thing is that the price of the security adjusts on the ex-date because the money has now been allocated.
The ex date is the first day when the security trades without rights to the dividend (or rights, or coupon etc). It's not the day when holders are entitled to the dividend because if you trade on a particular day, you don't own the securities until settlement occurs which is on a later day (different markets have different conventions here for how much later). The company/issuer will have a record date for administrative purposes when they take a snapshot of the ownership register so the ex date is the first date on which settlement will take place after that record date. The payment date may even be some weeks after this but is set by the company but this isn't really relevant to when the ex date is.
I think we are in agreement?
As I read your comments:
>> [The ex-date] is the day after holders of the security are entitled to the dividend.
> It's not the day when holders are entitled to the dividend because if you trade on a particular day, you don't own the securities until settlement occurs
Imagine that the ex-date for a security is 2017-05-19. You sell one such security on 2017-05-18. Settlement clears on 2017-05-22. Because of the delay in settlement, you held the security on the ex-date (and on the day before the ex-date), but you're not entitled to the dividend because you sold the security before the ex-date.
That's my reading of the two comments. I take no position on this. The point I'm making is different, that in the phrase "ex-dividend date", the "ex" and the "dividend" are not related to each other. They both relate to "date"; "ex-dividend" is not a logical unit within the phrase. However, the phrase "ex-dividend date" (good Latin usage) was clipped to "ex-dividend", and then people started assuming "ex" meant "without", because an "ex-dividend security" (no longer good Latin usage) was one that traded without rights to the dividend.
Stated another way --
A "dividend date" is a kind of date, a date related to the concept "dividend". "Ex-dividend date" is (originally) a prepositional phrase meaning "after the dividend date". It's not a kind of date related to the concept "ex-dividend"; "ex-dividend" is not a concept.
But then, English-speaking traders who didn't know Latin reanalyzed the phrase "ex-dividend date" as a noun phrase referring to a kind of date, which required a further reanalysis of what exactly "ex" meant. That new meaning, "without", is original to English.
In tree form, we have an original phrase (ex-(dividend date)) being reanalyzed as ((ex-dividend) date).
> Imagine that the ex-date for a security is 2017-05-19. You sell one such security on 2017-05-18. Settlement clears on 2017-05-22. Because of the delay in settlement, you held the security on the ex-date (and on the day before the ex-date), but you're not entitled to the dividend because you sold the security before the ex-date.
That's right. The ex date is relevant to the day you trade (which in practice means entering into a contract to buy and sell securities at a certain price, not actually delivering those securities/money), whereas the record date is the equivalent for the day of ownership. The ex date will be X-1 business days before the record date with X and the definition of business day depending on the market settlement convention. In some markets X=1 hence the confusion between the two, I think.
I suppose youre talking about terms of art. That's true for business too, I agree, but I'd argue that this is words/phrases like "EBITDA", "division", "tier 1 client". There's also useful shorthand like using the CEOs first name only, which happens even in Megacorps where few people have ever even met the CEO.
Corporate-speak is something different though to me - it's purpose is not to convey any specific meaning but simply to posture, which is why it's so widely hated.
Two of the more recent ones that really grate me are “lift” (which isn’t even used consistently, eg “what is the lift (effort) on this” and “how much lift (benefit) would this give us”)... and “North Star” shudder
Haven't heard the "lift" one yet but it feels like a bunch of high school students trying to create their own internal jargon which makes them appear more "hip" per se. Just replace a word with another, adding 0 value and excluding those who don't "get it" therefore creating an exclusivity around it's usage.
Also the "North Star" one, whew, shudder is correct. Let's bury that one forever.
Well this is a mean spirited attempt at destroying words that have meaning. Some people use them incorrectly and the nature of business moves on making them ineffective. Attacking them on multiple levels without describing when they are used in a positive sense seems unnecessary.
Can you give an example of some words you feel are being unfairly criticized? I.e. words that actually carry more meaning then their "plain" alternatives.
The author sure lost me at "the delightfully redundant root cause" (the last two words in italics). Root cause might be redundant, perhaps even delightfully so, but only if causation chains didn't exist. Almost seems as if "delightfully redundant" might be a buzzword phrase that The Atlantic writers use to pretend to be adults. This may be a bit harsh, but a text about bad language is just asking for scrutiny. (and "glasshousian" would make a fine addition to the arsenal important-sounding words, as I'm sure this comment will end up an incomprehensible mess when I hit reply)
What disappointed me more, though, is that the examples are just not very strong. I was hoping for examples far more juicy and over the top than the tired "disrupt" and "pivot".
‘Root cause’ is neither redundant nor simply a ‘corporate buzzword.’ It represents a clear concept of a causal chain with an underlying factor that gates all other contributing causes. The term has been around for a century and ‘root cause analysis’ is a formal construct in a number of professional contexts, including analysis of aviation incidents.
Except when people use it as a verb as in "we need to root cause this".
It's got a clear brevity win over "we need to look into this to find the root cause" or "we need to perform a root cause analysis on this". This isn't the case for "resources" instead of "people", or deliberate obfuscation like the article's example of "we're happy to provide you with the paperwork to provide to your insurance company" instead of "we only take direct payments" or "your feedback is greatly appreciated" for "no" or "we have a new billing model to suit the next few years of sustainable development" for "we're raising prices"
That sounds forced, but might still be better than "we need to do an RCA", because if someone doesn't know what RCA means in that context, then they have to ask.
You don't need 'more' meaning. These words are windows into a world of thinking about problems in a different light. I spoke to a developer who brought up the idea of disrupting Steam. I don't think that's going to happen this decade, the discussion around the idea was a good place to integrate some thoughts about gaming networks and game sales platforms. That is a productive outcome.
The author of this article is nearly vindictive in her complete portrayal that these words are vapid buzzwords that children use to appear adult and bewilder and fake their way through a paltry corporate existence.
You take away these words and people stop thinking out loud and with each other about productive ideas, analyses, directions and workflows that come from using all of the English language and not just what The Atlantic deems is above fakery.
Articles and corporate minded speech crimes like this make being your own boss mandatory, given you want to own your own mind and speech.
The op-ed (or the author) is right, that when this kind of language is used for big corporate broadcasts it always comes off as slimy, fake, long, inefficient fluff filled around sinister double-speak.
And it also got right that when workers hide behind this language others (and the work too) usually suffer.
Of course there never is "all general business speak". Every big company has a local lingo full of bullshit, acronyms, abbreviations, phrases and so on. HR, legal, CSR, marketing and sales - so basically pieces of broadcast style communication has a lot of similarity in them, but .. that's it.
This language is supposed to represent a clear and discussed idea for people to implement and unify around. As soon as the clarity on the meaning is lost, yes it becomes a slimy conformist tool for passing the buck, hiding in the shade of the CEO's bird wing.
Whether or not people are awake to what these words are meant to mean, they still have an impact. Mission statements and company wide training getting you to repeat the words they wish you to say, has an impact on you.
Disrupting and breaking things gives lower rungs of the organization license (when misused) to interrupt progress and deflect technical debt. The further you get from what it is supposed to mean, it can be applied more broadly and in a less targeted fashion, undermining it's original purpose but still having an effect.
Those broad and diluted changes in behaviour that stems from these annoyingly 'untouchable' and 'business speak' words can be beneficial. Were you to need to skip the investment in making proper technically complete products and instead needed to move quickly and could tolerate accruing technical debt, then "installing" the words disruption and breaking things and other buzzwords changes how people talk to each other, how they think in English whilst at work and how they behave when they are unable to guide their own actions past or around certain words.
Railing against buzzwords isn't going to disappear them, taking them out of your conscious perception is only going to make them stronger in directing the flow of business by amplifying the effect of the new wave of words you can't say whilst everyone around you focuses on 'stupidity' instead of 'alignment' (for example). In that case building large systems with less technical debt and more single-purpose easy-to-maintain pieces is much easier when you don't care how 'disruptive' people are and instead care when they are stupid enough to introduce technical debt.
Another day, another past set of cultural tools erased and new ones installed. Say hi to the new boss, same as the old one. It's amazing watching the internet and culture at large walk in conformist lockstep.
I saw this in the DoD when I was a contractor. Meetings full of buzzwords and abbreviations, some of which seemed to be tribal knowledge more than an actual thing. Things like "that solution won't work because of ABCD," and everyone nods in agreement. I had written down every abbreviation I heard to ask my supervisor later, and some he (and others) couldn't tell me what they stood for, despite being there for decades.
I worked once for a big global F500 company whose name is a abbreviation. In a meeting while we've been waiting I asked around if anybody knows what it actually means. Some tried to make up something. Everybody failed to come up with the actual meaning.
Corporate buzzwords are also how to say things that you can weasel out of later.
There was a great piece on this yesterday by Molly Young. In my opinion, it was significantly better. It contained this excellent point:
> As the leaked Slacks make clear, Korey, as well as her employees, were working under the new conditions of surveillance-state capitalism (or, from the company’s perspective, a culture of “inclusion and transparency”). One reason for the uptick in garbage language is exactly this sense of nonstop supervision. Employers can read emails and track keystrokes and monitor locations and clock the amount of time their employees spend noodling on Twitter. In an environment of constant auditing, it’s safer to use words that signify nothing and can be stretched to mean anything, just in case you’re caught and required to defend yourself.
https://www.thecut.com/2020/02/spread-of-corporate-speak.htm...
And this has always been true in PR and board room battles, but now is seeping to everwhere. Perhaps the rank and file will start to understand how execs and politicians have always suffered from the microscope.
I don't have anything to contribute, apart from a link to a comic which sums it up hilariously:
I’m curious when people swapped the word reply with revert. I keep seeing people use phrases like “I’ll revert” when what they mean is “I’ll look into that and get back to you”. Particularly working in software I always have to stop myself when the initial reaction is that they’ve just said they’ll undo what I’ve requested.
I believe that this usage is archaic in British business English rather than an innovation! However, it was conserved in business English in India and some other countries, and perhaps the increased interaction between Americans and Indians and in the software industry means you're just exposed to it more often?
The word revert, with this meaning, is still in widespread use in business in Britain too, in my experience.
Doubtful. I've worked in the UK for more than 20 years, and the only time I've ever heard this usage is within outsourced IT providers in India.
Perhaps it's industry specific but in finance/investment I see it used all the time (and I use it myself - I'm a Brit).
I’ve seen the word used in that context at two different UK companies.
Not in the circles I run in. If somebody said that in a meeting it would be so weird I'd probably question it because, and particularly in our environment, I'm pretty sure it would confuse everyone.
Yes. When you send an email about a commit, and you get a reply that they will “revert back” some time later, you can be very confused.
Especially if you use git or svn, given that “git revert” and “svn revert” exist.
As others have also pointed out, I also encountered this one with Indians.
There are people that love this stuff. Mind boggling to me how people can write pages and listen to hours on end. Some jobs require you to make speeches and write pages and pages of this lawsuit unfriendly botton line oriented language. Insane.
Another, better-written take on this: https://www.thecut.com/2020/02/spread-of-corporate-speak.htm...
This article has a clear value-prop.
We can table this discussion for now. Lets take it offline.
This problem is exactly why I decided to create my Slack app Whatis! https://whatis.rocks/
Shouldn't it be "What are rocks?"
Yes but in this case “rocks” actually refers to our team’s project to migrate from Oracle MySQL to Postgres. Did they not cover that in your onboarding?
I sometimes use "whois X?", even if the correct form would be "what is?" or "who are?". Using and old IRCism is just more fun.
I guess it would depend whether you were accessing the URL in the second or third person.
it could easily be "What is 'rocks'?"
Or that the entity/object represented by the noun "WhatIs" rocks.
Are workers not adults? I thought child labour was forbidden.